First-Year Essays Featured in New Rose Hill Online Journal

The journal was the idea of a group of graduate students, led by Allison Adair Alberts and Rose Hill Writing Director Moshe Gold, Ph.D., Associate Professor of English, who wanted to give core composition students a crack at the peer-review process and the art of crafting writing for an outside audience.

Alberts said she’d noticed that even her most talented freshmen had few outlets in which to write for an audience beyond the classroom. Last summer, she joined forces with a few English graduate students and Dr. Gold to start the magazine, which publishes entries of first-year undergraduate writing.

The eight non-fiction essays in the premiere issue were chosen by a editorial committee of graduate students, from approximately 40 anonymous entries submitted by Rose Hill faculty. Topics range from the immigrant experience to the problem of rising tuition in U.S. colleges, to a friend’s battle with cancer.

“They’re pretty weighty topics, and they represent the most outstanding examples of student writing from Fordham’s core writing classes,” said Alberts.

Once the selections were made, the student winners worked in tandem with faculty members to revise their prose.

“Not only have we tried to mimic the process of blind submission and reader response,” said Alberts, “but one of the most valuable things about this journal is that it helps the students navigate the revision process.”

Rhetorikos will be published twice annually, said Alberts. The current issue features work by members of the Class of 2014: Garrett Henderson, John McMenamin, Erin Murphy, Gabrielle Nugent, Timotheos Pariotakis, Bianca Pasquel, Venona Vilajeti and Allen Ying.